I am in my 40s, a single mother and business owner in the Visayas. I fell in love with a married man for 10 years starting in 1999. He told me he loved me and did not love his wife anymore. I considered him my soul mate and would drop everything when he called or texted. I knew his wife and three children because we were in the same line of business and our families used to go on sponsored trips together.

When my marriage was annulled, I was free to meet him anywhere. My family knew him and disapproved of our relationship. To appease them, I lied that we had broken it off. His wife even confronted me at one point. They left the country alternately for six months to work in the US. They finally migrated in 2009. I realized I had no future with him and started to entertain other suitors. I thought he might take our relationship seriously and commit to me if I did that.

The opposite happened. He began to date other women claiming he got hurt by what I did. Despite this, I still loved him. In 2011, while they were still in the US, his wife kicked him out because one of her friends confirmed my affair with him. I began to feel hopeful that he would finally choose me because he was free of her. I was so heartbroken when I found out that he had a girlfriend all along. He kept her from me while I was texting and e-mailing him. His fiancée texted me last year to stop communicating with him and informed me that he told her everything about us. I felt so betrayed and angry. I used to be a campus beauty queen and have a lot of suitors. I have joined a religious group but I also need to overcome my bitterness and move on.—Betrayed

Answer:

After years of wheeling and dealing with your emotions, he has become absolutely inured by your long relationship that clearly, he just didn’t care what he did to you—blatantly contemptuous of you by giving a rundown of your history to his new girlfriend? Granting that his brain has now migrated below his waist, and everything above it has turned to sop courtesy of this newfound love, has he lost all his civility that he couldn’t keep anything sacred anymore in his blackened heart?

You said you were a beauty queen once.  Are you aware that thinking about ugly situations and ugly-hearted people is contagious and may make you ugly as well? Can you imagine squandering your looks because of this worthless creep? Why gamble on that?

Haven’t you suffered enough and considered giving him up completely? Cease rationalizing what had happened. Start your healing process already! Flush him out. Walk away as fast and as far away from him as you can. Go into hypnosis if it will help you rid your system of someone as rotten. If you failed to read the handwriting on the wall when he was giving you the song and dance, start looking in the mirror now and see what this dead-end affair could be doing to you.

Wake up, give thanks and consider yourself lucky. This is the best thing that could have happened to you.

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